PrefaceCoincidences happen. The curator could not have foreseen that there would be parallels between the first and the second exhibit of this year. When I
arrived in Colorado in January, I was surprised to find works by
Australian aborigines in the museum, evoking water holes, snakes, and
songs, marking the landscape, while I kept to destroyed forests and
marching feet of soldiers. They, too, staking out terrain. The other,
obvious difference in similar treatments of space: The work of the
aborigines, no longer painted on wood or bark, have a very definite effect
in depicting the indefinite on panels; the result is decorative. By
contrast, the tree stumps evoke the destructive, the broken, and the
truncated, even if they regain dignity in museum environment. Destruction
is not a »privilege« of the 20th century, but something very »human.« Ever since our beginnings, we have been geniuses of invention and survival, but just as much of destruction.The »Great Society«, which calls itself the »Global Society« now, is a complicated, opaque kind of pell-mell, unprecedented in history. Ours is a society of suppression. We suppress, as far as possible, our terrible fears and desperations into which the condition of society would actually have to plunge us. Brave new world, in spite of everything. We go on, ever craftier, faster, and less and less foreseeable.